The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity • Hacker News Board

Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

#71

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 2:59 AM UTC

yesenadam wrote: post #51

sarbaz wrote: post #3

The article has some great examples of risks that were hyped out of proportion to their true severity. Should these things be considered? Yes. But only a little. If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere. Modern examples, IMO, are: - Kessler Syndrome - Trying to prevent an asteroid hitting the earth - Nuclear war making the entire earth uninhabitable

In the documentary The Man Who Saved The World , Stanislav Petrov travels to meet Kevin Costner, his favourite actor, at home. Costner asks him, if he hadn't acted as he did, how many people would have died. You expect him to say, 50 million, or something. He says, everyone . Everyone on earth would've died . It's a chilling moment. (And there's been a lot more than that one near miss.) What kind of crazy species are…

[deleted]

Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

#72

Post by mpalmer » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

whateveracct wrote: post #61

mpalmer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Nietzsche's words: > A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos – at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists. Where is Nietzsche's nihilism in what yo…

> Surely for a nihilist, "to have made an impact" is a non-goal. Not when the reason for making that impact is for, say, leaving a legacy after your death, getting into heaven (Christianity is very nihilistic according to Nietzsche), "having done 'something' with your life." Those are all very nihilistic-as-in-Nietzsche. Nihilism is first and foremost deferring this life for something else, and I think my peer's view…

> Nihilism is first and foremost deferring this life for something else.

Anything you can cite for this? It doesn't sound like any kind of nihilism I'm familiar with but I'm interested to know more.

Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

#73

Post by whateveracct » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 4:02 AM UTC

mpalmer wrote: post #72

whateveracct wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely for a nihilist, "to have made an impact" is a non-goal. Not when the reason for making that impact is for, say, leaving a legacy after your death, getting into heaven (Christianity is very nihilistic according to Nietzsche), "having done 'something' with your life." Those are all very nihilistic-as-in-Nietzsche. Nihilism is first and foremost deferring this life for something else, and I think my peer's view…

> Nihilism is first and foremost deferring this life for something else. Anything you can cite for this? It doesn't sound like any kind of nihilism I'm familiar with but I'm interested to know more.

Hm it was how my professors in school taught nihilism and Nietzsche. It was definitely a high level takeaway from many readings we did and not a single quote or citation. But it was on the exam ;)

I don't have any sources behind that atm, but I'd guess it would be somewhere around the discussion of the afterlife and how it is a Christian driver of nihilism.

Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

#74

Post by gnramires » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 4:21 AM UTC

whateveracct wrote: post #63

gnramires wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I... have to disagree. Either view is too simple. You're looking for balance of "saving the world" (i.e. our responsibility with civilization and all lifeforms) and "enjoy your life". Clearly if everyone is concerned exclusively with enjoying their lives (i.e. hyper-hedonism), society collapses; that's deeply irresponsible. If everyone is also hyper-focused on self-propagation of our species with zero regard to our a…

> why not fulfill your potential to the best you can? Invent the future, Hack the planet. This is exactly what I'm talking about though. If I just use my programming skills to automate some common tasks, make some nice webapps, make some fun or artful video games, etc..that feels like enough. As far as "why not?"..because the things I list are more interesting and fun for me. And they're already constrained enough by…

This doesn't compute.

> And to act like they are not worthwhile life pursuits because they aren't pushing humanity forward is a nihilistic viewpoint because it's focused on spending my life so that after-my-life benefits as if that makes it more morally correct.

What's so special of minds that exist at a later time? Note that under special relativity, spatial separation and temporal separation are relative to frame velocity. In effect, they're basically the same -- other minds, at other places in spacetime. If you accept that minds other than yours are important (as important as yours -- otherwise, what makes you so special to be the only consciousness that matters?), then you should help whether they are now or at some point in the future (of course, there's the question of reliability of impacting the future, but those are more practical questions).

As others mentioned, I don't see how this ethics identifies with nihilism and even less Nietzche's nihilism.

Your view seems more like akin to solipsism: the denial that other minds exist/have value as well. There are strong arguments against solipsism from computational theory of mind (which I may have discovered, I need to publish those).

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I'm working on a formalization of ethics that aims to answer this sort of question more helpfully and precisely than we've been historically (for now all I have to refer is a subreddit...).

Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

#75

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 5:24 AM UTC

mcswell wrote: post #66

ncmncm wrote: post #34

The article fails to note reasons why neither apparent existential risk was possible. We already had moon rocks on Earth, blasted off of the moon by bolide strikes. Likewise Mars rocks, and bits of asteroids and of other planets' moons. Maybe even Venus rocks. Relatedly, the energy released in certain bolide strikes on Earth far exceeds anything achieved even in Tsar Bomba, itself thousands of times more powerful tha…

"We already had moon rocks on Earth, blasted off of the moon by bolide strikes." True, but they (and any other meteorites) were likely sterilized during passage through the Earth's atmosphere.

It only takes a few minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the ground, not long enough to sterilize more than the surface.

Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

#76

Post by sarbaz » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 7:15 AM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #53

yesenadam wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the documentary The Man Who Saved The World , Stanislav Petrov travels to meet Kevin Costner, his favourite actor, at home. Costner asks him, if he hadn't acted as he did, how many people would have died. You expect him to say, 50 million, or something. He says, everyone . Everyone on earth would've died . It's a chilling moment. (And there's been a lot more than that one near miss.) What kind of crazy species are…

Nuclear war (especially during the cold war, when we had much more warheads than now) would absolutely be a big deal and a horrible mass death, but it would not have ended humanity. Like, if there's a scale of catastrophic events that goes from 0 to 10 where 0 is no big deal and 10 is human extinction, then the worst events humanity has ever seen are somewhere below 1 on that scale and absolutely horrific mass death…

And, in particular, I also think that nuclear winter is another one of these over-hyped scenarios. If you do the napkin-math it doesn't really work out.

Nuclear war will probably result in every major metropolitan area in the participating countries being obliterated. But I'm willing to bet that non participating countries will survive with their civilization intact. Especially countries with high food security that can deal with total collapse of international trade.

Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

#77

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Sep 06, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

perihelions wrote: post #16

Does SETI not count? Easy to imagine the first received ETI signal being some world-ending infohazard. [edit]: Targeting humans: a viral ideological, philosophical, or religious meme that causes us to self-destruct. A technological gift with insidious Trojan Horse functionality (a biotechnological machine with subtle side effects; a physics device that touches physics we haven't discovered). Irresistible instructions…

Easy to imagine the first received ETI signal being some world-ending infohazard.

An interesting variation on this theme: a future Elon Musk figure dons his black hat and launches a satellite capable of stationkeeping at a point in line with a nearby star. The satellite emulates such an ETI.

Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

#78

Post by yencabulator » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

chrononaut wrote: post #49

> Officials decided instead to open the door, and retrieve the men by raft and helicopter (see picture at the top of this article). While they wore biocontamination suits and entered the quarantine facility on the ship, as soon as the capsule was opened at sea, the air inside flooded out. ... that decision to prioritise the short-term comfort of the men could have released it into the ocean during that brief window.…

Lift it on a boat, connect a tunnel between the hatch and the quarantine area, leave that in place until end of quarantine?